Main Steps Towards Sharpening Your Talents

"To ignore your talent, is to ignore God in your life. To attempt to succeed apart from your talent, is to insult the wisdom of God. He made things that way. Every person on this planet is talented and you are not exempted, believe me or not. The people we refer to as great are those who have recognized their talents and working around the clock to sharpen them. Do you know what talents you have? You might have been told by almost everyone that you are not talented.

Accepting that you are talented is the first step towards sharpening your talents. Are you hoping that someday, the sky will be kind to you and a rich man will land and give you a cheque with a huge amount of money for doing nothing? That is not going to happen ever. Brain storm a little and figure out what talents you have and make a list of all of them on paper. To progress into greatness, your talent needs to be Just fan into flame. To fan into flame means to fully develop something to its maximum capacity. It is one thing to discover your talent, it is another thing to fully develop it. Until your talent is fully developed, you may not become significantly distinguished in life. Your passion is the life and energy of your talent. When you feed it, your talent grows. Your foremost ability is the servant of your talent. To set yourself up for greatness and capitalize on the way you are, you need to identify your unique characteristics. This is a process that takes quite some time but that is definitely worth doing!

The following four ways can help you get started:

1. Get out of your comfort zone

When I was in school, I always dreaded speaking on the assembly ground. I had once participated in a group song and that’s it. After that I made sure my teachers could not find me in the classroom to participate in anything related to stage; be it debate, speech or an act. I did not want to come out of my comfort zone because I felt safe and secure there; but it was costing me self esteem and confidence. Then a day came when I decided to get out of my comfort zone. I made up my mind to speak in front of many students in my department at the university. I had no clue as to what I will speak and how? And when the time came I was perspiring, my mouth was dry and I was clueless. But, I was determined. First two-three days before the day were nightmarish. But here comes the fourth day and things started turning smooth. That was the first day when I breathe outside the prison, a prison I had created for myself.

We all have our comfort zones. We function and operate from there and don’t want to come out because that feels awkward and uncomfortable. But getting out of your comfort zone is the only way to grow. You need to break the walls of that self created prison and come out in fresh air. Remember, it is by stretching and challenging ourselves that we grow. Comfort zones might be productive but never optimal. In order to become self confident, you need to do something that you have never done before, it will shake your whole world but it’s worth the effort. Start identifying your comfort zones and then deliberately stretch yourself up. The discomfort and nervousness you’ll encounter in the beginning is something you cannot and should not avoid. These are suppressed emotions and you must experience them so they can get released. Suppose your dream is to become a successful public speaker but the very idea of speaking in public makes you fearful, you are not sure what will you speak and how you will convey your message. Many a time it can alter your life for good if you could take a risk, risk to stand up in front of a group of people to speak even if you are clueless about what to speak. Why? Because when you trap yourself in a situation like this, you are bound to want to breakthrough, to say something: even one or two lines will give you courage and confidence to speak in front of more and more people over a period of time (If you practice enough). Getting it right will take time but don’t keep waiting for the right time, right place or right topic. Just go out and create something for yourself. When you stretch your comfort zone, you get a kind of satisfaction that you can never experience otherwise. “A person’s mind stretched by an idea never comes to is previous shape.” “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

2. Organize your life

There is an interesting and important paradox in life that you need to be aware of. It is that if you are an intelligent person, hence you must do everything possible to organize your life in such a way that you minimize and avoid adversity and disappointment. This is a sensible and rational thing to do to show how intelligent you are, following the path of least resistance to achieve their goals. A workspace or home that is clean, tidy and organized shows that you are well organized in your thoughts and actions. Organizing your life gives you a sense of control and power, then, boils down to developing and managing better routines and habits that can help to better assist you as you tackle your day-to-day duties.

Many people only summarize life in one word: chaotic. The term, which is described by Merriam Webster as “complete confusion and disorder,” is something that has become commonplace in our lives. From managing everything in between, life can certainly be described as chaotic. Life is a series of routines that are based upon habits. These habitual sets of behaviors are aggregated together to form our typical day. For the chaotic person, routines are generally interrupted by unexpected occurrences that result from either lack of planning, some form of procrastination, or the result of some constant or on-going emergency or crisis in life.However, by building better routines, you can help to manage the day-to-day chaos and help bring some order to your life. Without positive routines, life merely becomes a set of responses to stimuli that are hurled from every direction. The problem is that most of us don’t take the time to get organized from the ground up because we’re too busy tackling comes up at sudden not considering if it’s compulsory or necessary at that moment. A cluttered and disorganized life shows lack of orderliness and clarity. It keeps you in constant anxiety and tension. Intelligent people do everything possible tominimize the number of difficulties and obstacles that they will facein their day-to-day activities by organizing their lifes and homes. To start organizing your life, you need to tidy your life of junks and disturbances that come your way. Prioritizing is one of the best ways. You have to remove all of the “fat,” so to speak, and focus on the important parts. How is this done?

3. Develop a mission statement

It is here that we deal with our purpose, vision and our values. Our endowment of self-awareness to examine our maps of our life and, if we value correct principles, to make certain that our maps accurately describe the territory, It is here that we use our endowment to help us detect our own unique talents and areas of contribution. So we can use our endowment of imagination to mentally create the end we desire, giving direction and purpose to our beginnings. The first step to organizing your life and decluttering your mind is to build a mission statement.

Mission statements are not meant for companies only, thinking that is very wrong and far from the truth. Building a mission statement helps to give you a brighter and more precision-based focus on what you want and don’t want in your life. It is also here that our focused efforts achieve the greatest results. As we work within the very center of our Circle of Influence, we expand it. You have to think about what you want out of life. To start out, you need to separate what is important to you and what isn’t important to you?

On the left-hand side you’ll write down single words for what you want out of life. On the right side you’ll write single words for what you no longer want out of life. For example, on the left-hand side you might write out words like: love, savings, family, religion, integrity, business, and so on. On the right-hand side you might write out words like: cynicism, fear, defeat, anger, arrogance, regret, and so on.Not having a mission statement can be disastrous or simply put “shooting in the dark”. You don’t have a target for what you want and no longer want in life so you’re caught simply responding to things based on patterns and routines. By developing a mission statement you’re laser-focusing your life and organizing your mind in the process.

4. Build and set goals

Building goals is one of the ways ahead of a developed mission statement, you shouldn’t just afford to miss out in setting some clear and concise goals. Goals will help you to further your agenda in life by giving you a target of what you’re aiming at.

Your ability to set goals is the master skill of success. Goals unlock your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment. Without goals, you simply drift and flow on the currents of life. With goals, you fly like an arrow, straight and true to your target. Goals are important to decluttering your mind and organizing your life because they give you something to move towards. One of the rules for success is that, it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from; all that matters is where you’re going. And where you are going is solely determined by yourself and thegoals you set. So, how do you set goals the right way? Basically, you need to specifically define what you want. So, if you want to own your own business, what kind of business is it and when will you open up an office? What do you need to do in order to achieve that goal and specifically when do you plan on doing it? This way, you have a moving target. Your goals can also then be broken down into milestones that will help you to see what you need to achieve this week, month, and year. It’s so important to organizing your life. Without a concrete set of goals you are like fish that is floundering out of water.

5. Eliminate unnecessary stress

Stress is a killer of passion. Most of us are bombarded during the day and while you may not have control over those things that interrupt you, you have control over how you respond to it. We can’t simply say that we’ll eliminate all of the stress in our lives because we’re at the mercy of external forces at times that includes other people and situations. We can be at the mercy of others but it doesn’t mean that our mental state has to suffer because of it. If you can eliminate stress you can focus more on the things that matter to you in the long-term.When you have a mission statement that you can look back to it from time to time, you can help to put stressful situations into perspective. If an emergency problem surfaces, think about how you can resolve that problem while adhering to your mission statement. It is not necessary you lose track and forget your goal. Your mission statement will almost be like a constitution for governing your life. You can see what things fit and what don’t. And, for the things that don’t fit, you can come up with some policies for eliminating them from your life.

One of the ways of eliminating stress is organizing your life which we have talked about. Ignoring this can help us to lose sight of what we’re reaching for. That’s also why the goals are so important as well. The goals will further allow you to put things into perspective if you have a problem, try to look at it from the perspective of serving you in the long term. Your desire to eliminate stress will eventually inch you closer to your long-term goals.

6. Manage your time

Everything can fall into the category of either urgent or not urgent, and important or not important. When you can organize your daily tasks and look at things that come up as fitting into the four quadrants time management which will be discussed later, then you can better tackle the things that are important. Most times we are busy responding to things that are urgent and not important. We’re also usually busy doing things that are both not urgent and not important, such as mindlessly watching television for hours on end.

The goal here is to tackle the not urgent but important quadrant of things that need to be done in your life. These are what help you to strive towards your long-term goals. So, to better organize your life and declutter things, by using your mission statement and goals, you can help to make daily lists that will allow you to effectively manage your time much better. Time is a big matter to take cognizance of and I won’t fail to enlighten you more on it as you continue reading.

7. Building better routines

Life is a set of routines and habits that become ingrained in us. There are some must-have success habits, and there are also other habits that will help us to achieve long-term success in life. In order to organize your life and declutter things you have to build better routines. This doesn’t take an enormous amount of effort on your part; it just takes consistent and daily action to build the habit over time. Since we’re all a set of habits that have become ingrained in us as the years have dragged by, changing or rebuilding new habits is going to take time. This is why most people have problems with things like weight loss, over drinking, over smoking, and so on, because all of these things are based on routines and patterns that have become habitual in us. We will always revert back to what we know until we can completely redefine those things so that we can grow.

Anything that is broken, outdated or neglected is clutter. It shows that it has no use for you anymore and should be discarded, this really is the key to organizing and decluttering your life but this step doesn’t work by itself. “Don’t agonize, organize.” Florence R. Kennedy